Esther Jacobsen Burnham, opera supporter, 97

In the 1980s, when she felt San Diego Opera leader Ian Campbell and his wife, Ann Spira Campbell, who directs the opera’s marketing and development, were working too hard, she told the couple, “You kids need a break!”

“She picked us up in her Cadillac and took us out to Borrego Springs,” recalled Ann Spira Campbell. “Borrego Springs! Driving us all over the sand dunes. I was thinking, ‘We’re going to get stuck in the sand!’ She was an adventurer. She would go anywhere; she didn’t have any fears.”

Mrs. Burnham, 97, died Monday of congestive heart failure at her Point Loma home.

An active volunteer who gave her time to many organizations, Mrs. Burnham’s great love was the San Diego Opera, which she supported since the 1970s. She was named a life director of the opera in 1990.

She underwrote the opera’s 2000 production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as well as its world premiere of “Thérèse Raquin” in 2003, “Don Quixote” in 2009 and this season’s “Murder in the Cathedral.”

Mrs. Burnham also served as a commissioner of the City of San Diego Commission for Arts & Culture, and was a member of the UCSD Board of Overseers and Chancellor’s Associates. She also supported the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Diego Symphony, the San Diego Center for Children, the La Jolla Playhouse and the Neurosciences Institute.

Mrs. Burnham was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1915, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. She married Stephen Newmark in 1945. The couple moved to Los Angeles where they developed marinas until the late 1960s.

With her husband, Mrs. Burnham learned to sail and the two would race from Los Angeles to Honolulu; San Diego to Acapulco, Mexico; and Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro.

“Esther was an expert in celestial navigation,” Ann Spira Campbell said. “She would navigate their yacht all over the world.”

In Los Angeles she was an active volunteer and philanthropist. After Newmark died in 1970, she married Donald C. Burnham in 1973 and moved to San Diego.

Mrs. Burnham had no children. She remained actively involved with Malin Burnham, the real estate developer and business leader who is Donald Burnham’s son; Malin Burnham’s wife, Roberta; and her four step grandchildren and two step great-grandchildren.

“Most people don’t recognize that she was very, very proud of her Norwegian heritage,” Malin Burnham said. “I kind of relate to heritage and independence. She was always up; a lovely lady who didn’t have any enemies.”

He recalled a visit Mrs. Burnham made to Scandinavia and a visit to a castle built in 1475 that has been home to an internationally renowned music festival since 1967.

“On her 90th birthday, my wife, Roberta, and I took her to Norway to visit relatives, and all of us really enjoyed meeting them,” he said. “We cruised fjords, then drove by car through Finland. We went to an opera in an old castle on an island in the middle of Finland (the Savonlinna Opera Festival). She had a wonderful time.”

Malin Burnham said that his stepmother had requested that no services be held.